really useful would be to express the concern frankly and try to work
with the parent to figure out a respectful relationship with the right sort
of space. But the asymmetry inherent in the history makes this very hard.
It is extremely difficult for children to see the world from the point of
view of parents, as whole and fallible people, rather than thinking of
them as magical and huge.
Where do anger and forgiveness fit in? Both are expressed, all the
time— and sometimes the anger is well- grounded. Still, it is likely to be
inflated, as I’ve said, by status- anxiety, and the forgiveness of the parent, correspondingly, is likely to be infected by gloating at control and new
superiority. And even were this not the case, following the lead of anger
and its promise of self- respect is usually counterproductive.
In The Dance of Anger, psychologist Harriet Lerner describes an adult daughter in Kansas whose frequent migraine headaches and constant
anger revolve almost entirely around her mother— even though the
mother, living in California, visits only once a year. The mother is always
present, but things get much worse when she actually turns up:
During her therapy sessions, she would describe the horrors
of the particular visit to which she was being subjected. With
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despair and anger in her voice, she would recite her mother’s
crime sheet, which was endless. In vivid detail, she would docu-
ment her mother’s unrelenting negativism and intrusiveness.
During one visit, for example, Maggie reported the following
events: Maggie and Bob had redecorated their living room;
mother hadn’t noticed. Bob had just learned of his forthcom-
ing promotion; mother didn’t comment. Maggie and Bob effort-
fully prepared fancy dinners; mother complained that the food
was too rich. To top it all off, mother lectured Maggie about her
messy kitchen and criticized her management of money. And
when Maggie announced that she was three months pregnant,
mother replied, “How will you deal with a child when you can
hardly make time to clean your house?”24
(This really could be Doris Roberts, but then it would be funny. …) Of
course things go from bad to worse when the baby is born, in predictable
ways. Maggie wants Lerner to say her anger is justified, and to sympa-
thize with her; and of course her anger is at least what we have called
well- grounded. Its “payback” wish seems mild— only that the mother
will go away. But what lies within that wish may be less mild. Moreover,
the pain of separation for the mother is all too evident.
Lerner’s point is that asking who’s to blame and for what, keeping
a crime list, is rarely a useful thing to do. Even trying to figure out how
far the anger is well- grounded is likely to be counterproductive. Indeed,
in this case it positively obstructs useful change. What Maggie had
never done was to speak calmly about her goals and to let her mother
know the limits she believes compatible with her independence. That
would take work, and it would be risky, because things would then
have to change. Cycling round and round in the predictable “dance” is
a lot easier, because it means not having to address fundamental issues.
So anger becomes a deflection from the constructive job of working
out a reciprocal adult relationship. It is not just non- Transitional, it is
anti- Transitional.
Finally, as tensions around how to deal with the baby become
fraught, with Lerner’s encouragement Maggie finally breaks the predict-
able pattern. “Maggie’s heart was beating so fast, it occurred to her that
she might faint. She realized in a split second that it would be easier to
fight than to do what she needed to do.”25 What she needs to do is not to
talk angrily about independence and maturity but to be mature. And so, for the first time, she speaks to her mother calmly and firmly. Her mother
stands amazed. “Maggie felt as if she had stabbed her mother with a
knife.”26 At first her mother goes right back to the old pattern of intru-
sive criticism, but Maggie stands firm, while again and again her mother
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tries “to draw Maggie back into fighting in order to reinstate their earlier, predictable relationship.” When her mother slams the door, “Maggie had
the terrifying fantasy that her mother was going to kill herself and that
she would never see her again. Suddenly, Maggie noticed that her own
knees were shaking and she felt dizzy… . Maggie was beginning to leave
home.”27 And her mother too, terrified of being abandoned, is just barely
beginning to comprehend that there can be closeness without blame and
counter- blame.
Lerner makes two excellent points in this fascinating chapter. First,
she shows that anger is often a way of not solving the real problem, of
cycling it round and round. (And of course, the forgiveness that would
follow one of these routine fights would be just another part of the ritual.
We see this clearly when it’s an abusive spouse, just not when it’s us.) It’s like a game with repeat play, and in this case each repetition makes things
worse for both. Like all rituals, this one is rooted in the past. Especially
in the child- parent relationship, playing out the anger ritual locks both
parties into a posture of no- change, and positively deflects them from
examining what they need to do and what would really solve the prob-
lem. Indeed it compounds the problem, by focusing attention on what is
bad in the other, rather than on what might be good.28
Second, Lerner emphasizes that anger is easy and reasoning about
the future is hard, because repeating a problem is easier than solving it.
It is very challenging, when two people are close, to renegotiate a rela-
tionship that will include both genuine separateness and real love and
intimacy. Change is scary, whereas going through the familiar routine,
even if painful, is less scary.
Let us now return to our questions about respect and self- respect.
I think here the question about respect is the clearer of the two: we are
not inclined to say that Maggie’s new calm manner toward her mother is
condescending or disrespectful. Indeed it seems that it is only now, after
forgoing anger, that Maggie finally sees her mother as a whole and sepa-
rate person, and can treat her with respect as such. Does Maggie fail to
respect herself, when she puts aside her anger at her mother’s encroach-
ments? Actually, as Lerner argues, she is now stronger and more self-
respecting. She has given up the crutch of the anger game, and she is able
to stand up for herself in a productive way, forging true reciprocity for
the future.
As for empathy and playfulness: both were utterly lacking in the
“dance of anger.” With the calm renegotiation comes the beginning of
real thought in Maggie about the mother’s point of view, her ongoing
need for closeness. The two are still too tentative to tease one another
or be playful, but we can observe that the rigidity of the former rela-
&nbs
p; tionship, while humorous from the outside, made humor on the inside
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utterly impossible. (The role of repetition and rigidity in humor is
notorious.) After the renegotiation, things are more relaxed, and humor
might possibly begin to emerge.
As the two start talking about limits, independence, and a new
future, what place is there for forgiveness? Clearly there is no place for
forgiveness of the classic transactional sort. Indeed, to the extent that
apologies and demands for forgiveness— or even spontaneous offers
of forgiveness— become prominent, we would be right to feel that
the old “dance” was continuing. Maybe Maggie will need something
in the neighborhood of forgiveness to wean herself from her angry
feelings— but maybe not. Maybe thinking about her wrongs, and how
to forgive her mother for those wrongs, would be a way of not mov-
ing on with the constructive job. Anger will be dissipated far more
effectively by a new mode of interaction than by meditative exercises
about forgoing anger.
We have been talking about an ongoing relationship, and about
trivial wrongs— albeit wrongs that cause real suffering. What about the
truly terrible things some parents do to their children? Things such as
abandonment, neglect, and abuse?29 Often, in such cases, the parent is no
longer around in the child’s life, and the child is held captive by feelings
of resentment. In such situations, a type of internal forgiveness, mean-
ing a liberation of the self from angry and punitive wishes, can be very
important, and I shall discuss this sort of forgiveness further in section
VIII. Even in such cases, however— especially when the parents are not
monsters but deeply flawed and yet basically loving people— a kind of
generous letting- go is often more promising than delving into anger and
pursuing forgiveness.
A case in point is a best- selling memoir that is touted as a “memoir
of forgiveness”— but it really is no such thing.30 Liz Murray was the
child of two drug- addicted hippie parents. The parents were in a sense
extremely loving, but as their use of both cocaine and heroin increased,
they could not be effective parents. Her mother sold Liz’s winter coat, her
birthday money, even a Thanksgiving turkey a local church had given
them. The two girls were often hungry, and because they were unwashed
and lice- ridden, they were bullied at school and stopped going. Along
the way, her mother contracted AIDS, and Liz and her sister spent much
of their time nursing her— until she died, and the father, failing to pay
rent, moved to a homeless shelter. Liz lived on the streets.
The memoir is primarily about Liz’s decision to take her life into her
own hands, educate herself, and go back to school. It culminates in her
winning a New York Times Scholarship to attend Harvard, where she
began her studies in 2000. Because her father also had AIDS, she took
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time off to care for him (an episode not discussed in the memoir, which
ends with the scholarship). She graduated in 2009, and is currently a
motivational speaker.
How do anger and forgiveness figure in this terrible story? Liz
shows us clearly that her parents really loved her. She does not appear
to harbor a grudge or to have a difficult struggle with angry feelings—
toward them. She does report a lot of anger toward people who deni-
grate her attempts to educate herself. One obtuse welfare caseworker,
for example, taunts her when she talks about her Harvard interview,
not believing her. Liz gets really mad. “Blood rushed to my cheeks,
and I stormed out” (309). And her anger is very well- grounded. The
welfare system behaves pretty badly through most of the memoir. Still,
Liz does not waste any time on connecting with her anger or under-
standing it or even dealing with it. She just goes on with her life, in
the spirit of the Transition: “That’s okay, I thought, pushing open the
double doors and exiting that miserable office. That’s okay, because
despite my caseworker’s disbelief, I did have an interview with a
Harvard alumnus that afternoon. In fact, my schedule that day was
packed” (309).
So far as her father is concerned, she does report one brief episode
of forgiveness, but it is significant for what it omits. On Liz’s eighteenth
birthday, her father tells her that he has AIDS:
When the cake arrived, glowing with eighteen candles, they
both sang me happy birthday and Daddy gently squeezed my
hand below the tabletop— one awkward touch with his own
shaky hand… . In his gesture, I could feel him reaching out to
me across our distance, assuring me silently, “I know, Lizzy, and
I’m with you.” I couldn’t take my eyes off him, I was captured
by this image: my father clapping his hands before the smoke
of my extinguished birthday candles, so vulnerable and still
full of life right in front of me, for now. I wanted to grab on
to him, to protect him from AIDS. I wanted to make this stop
happening to our family, to keep him safe and to make him
healthy again.
I did not make a wish over my candles. Instead, I chose to
forgive my father, and made a quiet promise to work on heal-
ing our relationship. I wouldn’t make the same mistake that I’d
made with Ma, I would be there for him through this. We would
be in each other’s lives again. No, he hadn’t been the best father,
but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each
other. Though he’d disappointed me countless times through
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the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to
that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between
us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and
I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and
released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose
to forgive him. (294– 95)
Liz forgives her father, she says. But what she lets go of, as she tells the
story, is disappointment, “hurt,” and “anguish.” It is not anger. Indeed
we can see from the opening description that she loves him intensely,
and he her. They have been estranged, because she could not endure the
repeated disappointments: but her position (like that of Swede Levov)
was that of grief and helplessness, together with a wish to control his
choices that she increasingly realizes to be doomed. There’s no bitterness,
no resentment, no wish for payback— before or after. So what forgiveness
means to her is letting go of grief at his failure to be someone different,
and taking on the far more difficult task of supporting and caring for him
as the person he is (rather as Swede Levov takes on the job of visiting
Merry and trying to care for her until she dies).31 If she wants to call this forgiveness, fine, but it is very different from forgiveness in the classic
transactional mode (there’s no apology, indeed she renounces con
cern
with whether he regrets his prior actions), and different, as well, from
the sort of unconditional forgiveness (if one wants to call it that) that one might have if one is very angry, and lets anger go. There’s no Transition,
because there is no anger and no payback fantasy. She is as focused on
the future as she can sensibly be, given that her father does not have long
to live.
It is not surprising that as a motivational speaker Liz Murray’s
message is about taking control of your own life and building your
own future, not trying to make excuses by blaming others, and not
expecting to be able to control others. Her memoir goes in the opposite
direction from those therapies that urge people to delve into their inner
anger— even if that is supposed to be a prelude to healing. When the
time seems to have come for anger, she just doesn’t give anger the time
of day.
There are problems in Liz Murray’s approach to life (insofar as she
gives advice to others): It is all about the individual will, and it neglects politics. Some people really can will and discipline themselves into success, but these people are the lucky exceptions. Others may really need
therapeutic assistance in order to avoid or exorcise anger. More impor-
tant still, if the problems Liz encounters are really to be solved, society
itself has to change. The inhumanity and inefficiency of the social welfare
system should be addressed not by Stoic detachment, but by political
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change. That issue awaits us in chapters 6 and 7. For now, I focus on
her relationship with her father as a personal relationship, bracketing the
impact of institutions.
VI. Gratitude and Reciprocity
At this point it is time to revisit our discussion of anger’s good- pay-
back cousin. As I said in chapter 2, gratitude is typically regarded as a
first cousin of anger: given a high evaluation of some things or persons
beyond our control, we will naturally feel anger if someone wrongfully
damages those things, but gratitude if there is intentional benefit. Both,
say the Stoics, betray an unwise dependency on the goods of fortune, and
in chapter 5 I will basically agree with this critique in the Middle Realm,
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